A BRIDGE TOO FAR (1977) - May 28

Over Memorial Day weekend, TCM offers its annual 72-hour war movie marathon in honor of those who've served. Typically, we have plenty to choose from-- The Longest Day, They Were Expendable, Where Eagles Dare, among them--but let me make a case for one film in particular: A Bridge Too Far.

The film is a recreation of Operation Market-Garden, executed in September 1944, the largest airborne battle in military history. It was what military historians like to call "a failure." The objective was to secure bridges in Holland, allowing the Allies to advance north, then head east into Germany and bypass the Siegfried line. Success would mean an early end to the war. But as the title suggests, the Allies couldn't secure all the bridges--they planned "a bridge too far." The results were disastrous. Half the invading troops were lost. Though the Germans repelled Market-Garden, they suffered more than 3,000 casualties in just one battle, defending the bridge in the town of Arnhem. By the way, among the residents of Arnhem was a 15-year-old girl named Audrey Hepburn.

It took thirty years for this story of a rare Allied failure in Europe to reach the screen, at which point director Richard Attenborough and producer Joseph E. Levine set out to adapt historian Cornelius Ryan's book. Ryan, it's worth noting, also wrote The Longest Day. The production was massive, costing $26 million, an astounding budget at the time. Today, you can't get a good light sabre for less than $25 million. Some of the money went to authenticity--Attenborough shot a few scenes in the actual historical locations in Holland.

And much of the money went to the cast--perhaps the definitive all-star cast of the 1970s. Sean Connery landed a starring role--and then went on strike briefly upon learning that Robert Redford, playing a much smaller part, was making more money. Levine solved that problem the only way he could: he gave Connery a raise. The rest of the credits read like a casting director's fantasy list: Laurence Olivier; James Caan; Michael Caine; Elliott Gould; Maximilian Schell; Gene Hackman; Anthony Hopkins; Edward Fox; Ryan O'Neal; Dirk Bogarde; Liv Ullman; and Denholm Elliott.

Critical reception was mixed, at best. The film's length was certainly an issue, but some associated with the production say a bigger issue was time and sensitivity. It opened in 1977, only 32 years after the war, and some critics may have been put off by such a grand telling of an insufficiently planned Allied defeat. But today, we rightfully ignore all that. Instead, we see a three-hour epic that dramatically recounts the details of what went wrong, while highlighting the bravery of the soldiers who dropped from the air and those who fought on the ground.

by Ben Mankiewicz